TITLE: Universal covering map from $\mathcal{H}$ to $\mathbb{C}\setminus \mathbb{Z}\oplus i\mathbb{Z}$ (the countably punctured complex plane)
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: It's a consequence of the uniformization theorem for simply connected Riemann surfaces that the universal cover of $\mathbb{C}\setminus(\mathbb{Z}\oplus i\mathbb{Z})$ ($\mathbb{C}$ punctured at all the integral lattice points) is the upper half plane $\mathcal{H}$.
How should I think about this map? How does the map behave near the missing lattice points?
A related question is this: $\mathcal{H}$ is also the universal cover for a punctured torus, whose fundamental group is $F_2$, the free group on two generators. By comparing the punctured torus to the wedge of two circles, I feel like the universal cover for the punctured torus, ie $\mathcal{H}$, ought to be deformation-retractable to an infinite 4-regular tree. Ie, the infinite 4-regular tree ought to be able to be embedded in $\mathcal{H}$ such that the vertices of the tree all lie on the boundary of $\mathcal{H}$. What does this tree look like in $\mathcal{H}$?

REPLY [11 votes]: On the first question (the universal cover of the complement of a lattice). The missing points are in the image, so it is not the map that "behaves" but the inverse map.
The inverse map behaves in a very simple way: it has infinitely many "logarithmic singularities" over each missing point. 
"How to think about the map" is not a well defined question. But the way I think about
it is this. Consider the circular quadrilateral inscribed in the unit disc, say with
vertices 1,-1,i,-i; the sides are arcs of circles orthogonal to the unit circle. All
angles of this quadrilateral are 0. There is a
conformal homeomorphism of this circular quadrilateral onto a (rectilinear) square
with vertices 0,1,1,1+i, sending vertices to vertices.
By Schwarz's symmetry principle, applied very many times, the map extends to a map from the
unit disc to the plane minus the lattice. This is our universal covering map. You can make
a picture. You can express it in terms of special functions (it is a ratio of two solutions
of a very special Heun equation, linear differential equation of second order with regular 
singular points at 1,-1,i,-1.
EDIT: I am not sure what exactly you want to know, in your question you mention visualization, rather than computation, but once I computed this map,
arXiv:1110.2696. It can be expressed in terms of hypergeometric functions.
And I also asked a MO question related to it:
Maximum of a function of one variable.